How to Recover When you Get Off-Track

Confession Time. The last couple of weeks have been rough for me with my goals. I had been consistently making progress since about late December. My Goal Tracking app was telling me that I was just about on pace for most of my goals for the year. Then I ate a bit too much junk food on my birthday and gained a few pounds. Then I stayed out late a few too many nights. Then I got sick.Before I knew it I’d gone nearly a week without working to make any significant progress on my goals.

If that’s ever happened to you, you know that it can be pretty depressing. “What am I supposed to do now?” is often the question at this point. If I was struggling to stay on-track when I was on top of my game how am I supposed to come back after falling so far behind? The answer is pretty simple, but it isn’t easy.

Get back on the horse. Or, in the infamous wisdom of Nike, “Just do it.”

This is where the excuses start to rise up. “But what about this. . .” or “Well, my situation is unique because. . .” The way to get back on track remains the same, just get started again.

I know that if you’re feeling down and having a rough time advice like “just do it, get back on the horse” can feel insensitive or even hurtful. That’s not my intention at all, let me explain my thinking in a little more depth.

[Tweet “Nike’s Slogan may be just what we need to get back on track with our goals.”]

It’s a simple reality of life that things never go exactly as planned. We don’t have to like it, that’s just the way it is. We’re not robots. We don’t live in perfect, highly controlled and programmed environments. Because of this, it’s not realistic that we’re going to make consistent progress 100% of the time. That’s not the assumption when I say “Just do it.”

On the contrary, my assumption is that we’re not going to be perfect. We’re going to cave to our cravings on occasion. We’re going to get sick. We’re going to have circumstances arise that we couldn’t have predicted or planned for. That doesn’t mean that we have to give up on our goals, it just means that we have to make a course-correction. It means that, at some point, we must choose to begin again.

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This is what it looked like for me to get back on track.[/caption]

Granted, sometimes our circumstances change so drastically that we need to scrap our original goals and refocus on something else. Most of the time, however, it’s just a matter of choosing to pick up and start making progress again. At a certain point, whatever circumstances caused you to press pause on your goals aren’t what’s stopping you from making progress anymore. Rather, it is feeling defeated over having to press pause that keeps us from beginning again.

[Tweet “Getting back on track with our goals usually just means choosing to pick up and start again.”]

The liar called “perfection” whispers in our ears telling us that we’re too far behind. We’ll never make up for the lost time. We’ll never get it perfect, so why even try? And so we give up, at least temporarily, and whatever circumstance threw us off track does far more damage to our progress that it would’ve on its own. All because we buy that lie.

That’s where I was as I began writing this post. I had some lingering symptoms from my cold, but really I was over the worst of it (and well enough to be going back to work). My bed was warm and my room was cold. I was very strongly tempted to phone it in just one more morning. (It’s always just one more, isn’t it?) I was tempted to tell myself that I was still recovering and stay in bed an extra hour or so.

Thank God for my amazing wife! She was on it! She got up and started going on her day and that inspired me to just get up and get back to work. Am I behind? Yes. Is it overwhelming to think of how I might get back on track? Definitely! Am I going to let that stop me from making progress. No! And neither should you.

How do you feel when you get off-track on your goals? Do you find that you feel like giving up, or that it simply strengthens your resolve? Let me know in the comments below!